Clint Eastwood, Bard of Competence
The director’s latest film eschews his typically epic cinematic themes to revel in an everyday miracle: being good at one’s job.
MEGAN GARBER
7:00 AM ET
In the days after US Airways Flight 1549 ditched into the Hudson River, with all 155 people aboard the plane surviving the impact, the water landing came to be known as “the miracle on the Hudson.” The term came from the movies: “We had a Miracle on 34th Street,” New York’s then-governor, David Paterson, said in a speech hailing the heroics that made for the successful water landing. He paused. “I believe now we have had a Miracle on the Hudson.”
In his upcoming movie about the fated flight, Sully—named, of course, for the pilot who guided the Airbus to safety that day—Clint Eastwood frames that miracle in more prosaic (you could also say more humanist) terms. Here, the successful ditching of the plane into the frigid waters of the Hudson is a triumph not of divine intervention, but of something both duller and more interesting: basic human competence. Things worked out the way they did that day because Captain Chesley Sullenberger and his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, were able to summon years’ worth of rote aviation experience to transform a narrow body of water into an ad hoc runway.
That bit of spiritual revisionism would seem to make Sully, which will premiere on Friday as the 38th movie Clint Eastwood has directed, fitting for a moment whose movies are as concerned with reveling in life’s banalities as with escaping them. Sully is Eastwood’s entry into an expansive—and burgeoning—genre: “competence porn.”
This term seems to have been coined in 2009, by John Rogers, one of the writers of the TV show Leverage—based on his recognition that, “for the audience, watching competent people banter and plan was a big part of the appeal.” The genre is older than its coinage, certainly; Star Wars would be considerably less awesome had Luke been unable to get the hang of a light saber. But it is having a particular moment now. Its exuding of competence is what helped to give The Martian its “science the shit out of it” verve. And what makes Olivia Pope, in Scandal, compelling as a professional as well as a character. And also the doctors of Seattle Grace. And the wonks of The West Wing. And the space-travelers of Star Trek. (And also the cooks of Top Chef, and the designers of Project Runway, and the singers of The Voice, and the bakers of The Great British Baking Show.)
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/clint-eastwood-bard-of-competence/498626/
= new reply since forum marked as read
agreed, though there have been those saying this for some time.
Though he might be the most visible.
The movie is called "Sully" though they do use the "miracle" in the tag.
[IMG]
[/IMG]
for the Hospital with the cyber-knife surgery. First person narration of a Pastor who thanks God first and then the surgery team for his successful surgery. Seems he gets it backward. 
if the surgery hadn't gone as planned, something went wrong, he, or others would blame the surgeons and say "it was gods will."
